This invention relates to a board game apparatus particularly of the kind which can be used in patience-type games where a player can play on his own and can put down the game at any time and revert to it at will.
Patience games of this type have been known for a very long time and have always found great favour with the public for passing idle moments. Games of this sort are particularly advantageous if they can be picked up and put down at will without the necessity for resetting up the game whenever it is picked up after a period of disuse. The most successful of games of this sort in recent years has been the Rubik cube, however many other games of this sort using coloured surfaces of blocks or articles have been available.
Other types of board games have been developed where counters or blocks are moved across a surface and usually these are competitive games requiring two players. One example of such a board game is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,303,246 (Strongin). In this apparatus a plurality of tracks arranged in rows and columns is defined between two plates one of which is transparent. Each player is then provided with a plurality of blocks with a surface having a visible characteristic such as a colour or marking to identify the player's blocks. The players then in turn insert blocks into the tracks between the two plates in such a way that a new block inserted acts to move any remaining blocks in a column or row in which the block is inserted and to eject the last block in the row or column if the row or column is full. In a game similar to naughts and crosses, the first player to complete a solid row or column or diagonal with his blocks is declared the winner. Such an apparatus is entirely satisfactory when used as a competitive game in which the players must sit down specifically to play the game and remain playing until the game is complete. However, it is unsatisfactory as a patience-type game because it requires to be set up afresh each time the game is picked up.